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It has come to my attention that in this world appearance is absolutely everything. If you don’t dress a certain way, wear your hair in an appropriate style, or exude an outer appearance of someone made for this world, then you essentially are not worthy. You aren’t worthy of any time, nor worthy of any conversation, debate, or attention. Am I wrong or am I right? I sincerely would love to know, please leave a comment below. Is it not true that when you go to a restaurant, you don’t want to get a plate of pasta that has sauce splattered all over and sliced tomatoes that are in a pile on the side? You want a plate that is beautifully designed, with sauce filling the center and tomato slices delicately placed on top. Once again, appearance seems to be everything. Now, what about with art?

Do we art appreciators enjoy and buy art because it is pretty, therefore making it worthy? I’d like to think that is not the case. In the creative world, from fashion to film to portraiture and paintings, there are quite a few images or fashions that are applauded simply because of its lack of traditional constructs of beauty. It can be the way a dress has an outlandish shape or a funny interpretation of  a seemingly normal landscape, and somehow it draws us to it, loving it, appreciating it, and purchasing it. Take the image below for example, it’s not something I would normally picture in my head when someone says I’m going to make an image that works with color! Nor does it have the normative constructs of beauty that we are so inclined, in other aspects of life, to deem worthy. But this is a great image, the way in the colors and the lines overlap, covering the person’s face and leaving their hands criss-crossed and exposed, entices me in a way that makes me appreciate this work.

Brian Vu – True False series

My question is, why is it that this socially constructed idea of beauty favored in some aspects of life making it worthy to others, yet when it comes to the creative field, unique interpretations are favored, yet sometimes misunderstood?

My friend Fiona has historically been the facilitator of most of my impromptu-concert-going. Once during my freshman year I was studying in the East Quad basement when Fiona called me offering a ticket to see Girl Talk at the Blind Pig if I could make it to a street corner across town “on Packard next to the brick house” within ten minutes. More excited by the adventure than I was mildly psyched to see Girl Talk, I ditched my backpack with a friend and jogged to Packard and hill to join her concert-going caravan. But I got out of class this past Thursday, charged my phone and found a text from Fiona inviting me to see Mac Demarco at the Magic Stick, I was excited both to have some much-needed spontaneous fun and to see one of my favorite new musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mac since about the time that everyone became a fan of Mac, when he found commercial success with the release of his laid-back but straightforward album ‘2,’ a series of carefree odes to cigarettes, apologies to his mother, and tender love songs. A word-cloud of reviews and write-ups on Demarco would probably come up with bolded key-words like ‘stoner’ (though he doesn’t touch the stuff), 90s-alt, and ‘hat (he fields a lot of questions about his omnipresent baseball cap),’ but I like better comparisons to solo John Lennon and My Bloody Valentine. Demarco himself does nothing to combat more casual descriptions of his music, calling his style ‘jizz-jazz,’ but his refusal to take publicly take his own music seriously seems to just reflect a kind of ambivalence towards his sudden success. Demarco’s newest album ‘Salad Days,’ released April 2^th, is now being heralded as a finessed elaboration on ‘2,’ with the same laid-back rock’n’roll feel applied to more serious, reflective lyrical subject matter.

The Magic Stick sold out at a capacity of 275, and the venue was already filling up by the time we arrived. “ It’s when I come to shows like this that I remember – there actually aren’t that many hipsters in Ann Arbor,” Fiona laughed as she surveyed the crowd, where pastel colored hair, dreads, PBR, beards and plaid abounded in a pretty comprehensive exhibit of the new crusty edge of hipsterdom.

As soon as Mac and three person backing band wandered out onstage to do their own sound check, I immediately realized that I wasn’t going to be able to see anything and jumped at the chance to sit on the edge of a table above the crowd. The seat turned out to be a godsend for a short kid, especially when as the first song started the crowd unexpectedly began moshing in an odd but endearing show of enthusiasm for the laid-back rock’n’roller. The performance itself was full of infectious, genuine enthusiasm. Tour reviews often cite the musician’s odd proclivity to strip completely naked and/or get obscene with drumsticks, but the set was mostly gimmick-free, besides the dutiful singing of a happy-birthday song to a brave 16 year old mosher. My vantage point gave me a great view of Mac’s onstage dynamic – laid back but engaged, grinning through his gap-tooth and joking with his band members. Although Demarco actually records every instrumental part on his albums himself, he tours with three of his old friends on guitar, bass and drums, forming a crew of musician-friends that clearly enjoy playing together.  When Demarco occasionally put his guitar aside to play keyboard and sing with the mic in his hand, he closed his eyes as though earnestly soliloquizing – but beyond the occasional tender moment, Mac gave a generally buoyant and upbeat performance. By the time he gleefully took off his omnipresent baseball cap and crowd-surfed back and forth, the crowd greeted him like an old buddy.

We waited to meet him afterwards in a queue that was less like a line and more like an anxious vortex of iphones swirling around the tired musician. He seemed exhausted, dutifully throwing up peace signs for instagram pics, signing girls’ jean jackets in lipstick, and gracefully accepting a demo tape someone slipped into his jacket pocket, but sometimes staring off into space between groups of people. I almost felt bad for him by the time Fiona and I made it to the front of the needy vortex, and we both made it a point to look him in the eye and thank him for the great show. “Sure,” he said, “thank you.” As we shuffled off, he quietly accepted a fan’s offer to trade hats, and a skinny kid walked away grinning wildly, wearing what looked like a very well-loved, very dirty white baseball cap.

 

 

As hundreds of unshaven middle aged folks swarm the campus, we can take a break from the puffs of smoke and baja’s to admire the change in weather. Although anyone living in Michigan for more than year knows that it’s too early to ditch the winter jackets, it’s certainly getting close to Spring. As I’m not quite as eager as the daring young boys who wear shorts solely because it was above 50 yesterday, I choose to tie myself over in the wait with poetry. For all you midwesterners out there, here’s a poem by Bob Hicok in the anticipation of daffodils.

 

A Primer

by Bob Hicok

 

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go

to be in Michigan. The right hand of America

waving from maps or the left

pressing into clay a mold to take home

from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan

forty-three years. The state bird

is a chained factory gate. The state flower

is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical

though it is merely cold and deep as truth.

A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”

can sincerely use the word “sincere.”

In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.

When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life

goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,

which we’re not getting along with

on account of the Towers as I pass.

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget

how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.

It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.

The Upper Peninsula is a spare state

in case Michigan goes flat. I live now

in Virginia, which has no backup plan

but is named the same as my mother,

I live in my mother again, which is creepy

but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,

suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials

are needed. The state joy is spring.

“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”

is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,

when February hasn’t ended. February

is thirteen months long in Michigan.

We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us. “What did we do?”

is the state motto. There’s a day in May

when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.

In this way I have given you a primer.

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

As I sat in the UMMA lobby waiting for the rest of my Art History class to arrive, I pulled out my laptop to work on a paper. After a minute or so I had a disconcerting feeling that I was being watched. Slowly I glanced up and took at closer look at the words being projected on the screen in front of me and noticed a line of brief phrases that went a little something like this “adjusts clothes / sits down on bench / pulls out laptop / crosses legs…” I realized that these were all things I was doing and looked around, making brief eye contact with a girl who held my gaze, smiled, and returned to furiously typing on her laptop. Then I looked back to the screen: “smiles briefly / looks at the projector.” Then I knew for certain that I was being watched. So here I sit, writing about an artist writing about me, though not just me. She taps away at her laptop, fast brisk descriptions of everyone in the room, describing the environment, the people, everything she sees feels hears. Is this art? She’s writing about me again, about my typing. Little does she know it’s about her. We’re engaged in a symbiosis of using each other to create our art. Funny how that works.

As part of the Upstart Festival Basement Arts put together the Wall to Wall Theatre Festival which took place in the Walgreen Drama Center March 29 and 30. The concept for the Wall to Wall Theatre Festival was to create a museum of theater, running 9 unrelated 30 minute shows on a continuous loop for 3 hours and allowing the audience to pick an chose which shows they would attend and in what order.

Of the 9 pieces Speak to Me (the piece I was in) was one of the more avant garde works relying completely on improvisation within the a simple structure of inner and outer exploration leading to communication hindered by the lack of a common medium. My medium consisted of the text from a German art song by Strauss and an excerpt from a Bach Cantata as well as physical movement.

Initially, I signed up for the project because I knew it was a low time commitment and I liked the concept of the festival. I did not know which piece I would be a part of and was initially concerned by the improvisatory nature of Speak to Me. I had never improvised on such a large scale and never while having to interact and work with other performers, especially ones who were simultaneously improvising.

Regardless of all my concerns at the beginning of the process I could not be more please that I took part. By forcing myself to improvise using existing text and pieces of music I discovered what people mean by saying one must live in the music. As I performed I forgot the little voice in my head that is perpetually concerned with using proper technique and ignored the part of my brain that never enjoys the moment but is looking forward to the next note. As I lived in the music and in the moment I lost all track of time, making 30 minutes of improvisation fly past.

For the audience, the Wall to Wall Theatre Festival was a chance to get tastes of different types of performance art without overwhelming themselves. For me, it was a chance to explore the music within songs that I have sung hundreds of times and rediscover the music beyond the notes written on the page.